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by bigdollopenergy 1367 days ago
If the company supplies the hardware and software as a bundled unit, they are much more able to arbitrarily restrict and wall-in the device. It's just how the law works. This is how Apple seems to get away with a lot of super anti-competitive stuff that Microsoft simply could never with it's Windows OS (Microsoft being crucified for favoring IE being a prime example, while Apple blatantly does the same thing with Safari). That said, Microsoft can and does do all the same stuff on their Xbox or surface tablets, because in that case they do supply both the hardware and software. There's no "good" or "bad" company when it comes to this issue, as they both willing to do this in every scenario when they can get away with it.

Why it's structured this way, I've no idea. I don't think supplying the hardware should be the distinguishing factor that allows them to wall-in the device. It's one thing to force them to support and integrate devices/software into their product, which is probably not fair on the company, but it's another thing to actively get in the way. It's a thin line with a lot of grey area, but the way it's setup currently probably isn't right.
1 comments
notriddle 1367 days ago
Are you sure it doesn't have something to do with Microsoft holding 80% of the desktop market at the time, while Apple only has 50% of the smartphone market now?
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dylan604 1367 days ago
At 50%, do you start fudging numbers to ensure you go no higher? "No, Senator, we are not the majority of users, so we can't be a monopoly." Or maybe that's too immoral, so start funding the other(s) to prop them up? Microsoft propped up Apple to ensure there were other consumer OS makers with Apple being the most viable* competitor.

*viable is doing a lot of heavy lifting as they did need that propping up

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notriddle 1367 days ago
> At 50%, do you start fudging numbers to ensure you go no higher?

I get why you wouldn't want to trust Apple's self-reported numbers, but why would Wikimedia [1] also report Android as being more popular than iOS? What do they get out of it?

[1]: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...

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